Posts Tagged ‘2016’

Many news outlets covered Univision Communications’ purchase last week of a stake in The Onion, the world’s leading news publication. According to NPR, Univision bought a 40 percent controlling interest in the company, and also acquired the option to buy the remainder of The Onion in the future.

But what’s gotten no attention at all is that Haim Saban, Hillary Clinton’s biggest fan and financial supporter, is Univision’s co-owner, chairman, and CEO. Saban and his wife, Cheryl, are Hillary Clinton’s top financial backers, having given $2,046,600 to support her political campaigns and at least $10 million more to the Clinton Foundation, on whose board Cheryl Saban sits. The Sabans are also generous supporters of the overall Democratic Party infrastructure, donating, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a total of $16.1 million since 1989 to Democratic and liberal candidates, party committees, leadership PACs, and federally focused 527s.

Saban is a rabid supporter of Israel and a business partner of the Murdochs.

Like this:

As Charles mentioned last week, the three remaining major Democratic candidates (Linc Chafee and having bailed, and Jim Webb probably preparing for a third-party run from the right to try to do to Hillary Clinton in the general what he couldn’t in the primary) met on Telemundo for a forum, using the time slot that was supposed to be filled by the third Republican presidential debate. (Univision is carrying one of the Democratic debates in March, which is probably why the Telemundo Democratic event became a forum instead of a debate.)

Greg Sargent has a nice article explaining how the GOP shot itself in the foot with Latinos as the entire party strove to see who could out-Trump Trump in showing their hatred for immigrants:

Republicans are pulling out of their only scheduled debate that would be aired on a Spanish-language TV network. So Democrats may respond by holding a second gathering aired on one.

[…]

But you’d think it would be a good idea for Democrats to try to make this happen. The RNC is claiming there will be another debate scheduled to replace the cancelled one on NBC and Telemundo. But RNC chair Reince Priebus has declined to say whether Telemundo would be included in the replacement debate. Obviously the RNC did not cancel this debate because of the Spanish-language network’s participation; it had many other reasons for doing so. But one consequence of this decision could be that Republicans end up holding no debate aired on a Spanish-language network. If Democrats do add a second such gathering, they would then be able to argue that they are far more interested in communicating with Latino voters than Republicans are, which is a good message for the general election.

Indeed, one of the GOP campaigns — that of Jeb Bush — is actually protesting the decision to cancel the NBC/Telemundo debate, and demanding that Telemundo be reinstated, presumably because Latino outreach would be good not just for Jeb Bush, but for the GOP overall. Guess which GOP candidate isopposing a reinstatement of Telemundo? Yep: Donald Trump. All this comes after GOP establishment types went into full-scale panic earlier this fall over the damage Trump — with his call for mass deportations and suggestion that Mexican immigrants are rapists — may already be doing to the GOP brand among Latinos. And it comes as incoming House Speaker Paul Ryan is renewing his pledge not to act on immigration reform while Obama is president.

Looks like Jeb’s finally realized that he shouldn’t have let himself get panicked by the base’s craving Trump’s blatant expressions of bigotry. The key for him, as it always has been, is to sit back and let Trump suck up all the oxygen to Jeb’s right, killing off all of Jeb’s rivals on the right; then, when Trump fails to advance past Super Tuesday, be ready to pick up Trump’s crestfallen supporters as the last man standing – and, more importantly, a man who won’t scare off moderate voters in the general election. The question for Jeb is if he has any backers left who are going to be patient enough for this strategy to work.

The speech that Hillary Rodham Clinton gave at Texas Southern University on Thursday regarding the right to vote even was better than I expected it to be. It was a thwacking, name-checking jeremiad that took for granted the obvious fact that the Republican party, and the conservative movement that is its only real energizing force, has embarked on a systematic campaign to disenfranchise those voters unlikely to vote for Republican candidates, and that the campaign has been abetted at the highest levels of conservative politics which, in this case, happen to include the Supreme Court of the United States. She talked about how Rick Perry had worked to restrict the franchise in Texas, and how Scott Walker had done so in Wisconsin. Then, she said this.

“And in Florida, when Jeb Bush was governor, state officials conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the presidential election of 2000.”

Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, has told NBC and CNN that they will not be allowed to have any Republican presidential debates in 2016 if they go ahead and air planned films about Hillary Clinton, who will likely be the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. That is the reason he gave them, at least, but it is not the actual reason Priebus wants to not have any debates on those two channels. The real reason, everyone knows and sort of acknowledges, is that debates were a disaster for the party in 2012, an endless circus made up entirely of clowns on a national tour of shame.

But while Priebus would like to see the primary debates go away, the primary candidates would not:

Preibus wants there to be fewer debates, because the debates are hugely embarrassing to the party and damaging to the eventual nominee. The candidates, though, need the debates, because there is nothing so precious as free airtime, and saying stupid things on television and then losing elections is a surprisingly lucrative career move these days. The debate problem is like the Ted Cruz problem: He acts against the long-term best interests of his party because in the shorter term, being an ultra-conservative is likely to make him rich and beloved. When 2015 rolls around a half-dozen would-be presidents and tryouts for the conservative speaking circuit are going to want free airtime, and the networks will happily provide it. The only question is whether the eventual “serious” nominee, if that’s Jeb Bush or Chris Christie, is going to join them or not.

Undeterred, O’Donnell simply switched from proclaiming Pawlenty a shoo-in for top of the GOP ticket to proclaiming him a shoo-in for the second slot on the GOP ticket. This is what LOD was saying as recently as last Thursday, when he chomped down hard on this Politico teaser: “Tim Pawlenty has jumped to the top of the vice presidential shortlist of several Mitt Romney advisers after emerging as the most effective — and well-liked – surrogate for the GOP-nominee-to-be, according to several Republicans familiar with campaign deliberations.”

O’Donnell spent that segment hammering Politico for what he called taking the word of a Pawlenty associate on this matter when in fact Pawlenty had been the front-runner for the GOP running mate slot for 223 days “and I put him there!”

So why did Pawlenty say no? There are two likely scenarios: 1) He knew Romney’s people were going to stiff him just like McCain’s did and he wanted to do a face-saving preemptive-strike move, or 2) He can read polls. I subscribe to the second scenario, and here’s why:

Remember, this is the guy whose primary reason for wanting the 2008 RNC in St. Paul was so he could appear on stage as John McCain’s running mate. He fully expected to be picked by McCain, much as Bob Dole fully expected to be picked by George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988. He wants the presidency — or the vice presidency — so much he can taste it.

Why would such a man turn down an offer to be on the 2012 Republican presidential ticket? Because he can read the polls:

Plus, Pawlenty’s seen this past week how well the Latino community has reacted to Obama’s end run around Republican refusal to pass the DREAM Act. That’s going to be a big issue in Florida. If he wasn’t sure before that Romney’s going to go down in flames, he’s probably sure now — and he doesn’t want his 2016 presidential-nomination résumé contaminated by being the running mate for a failed presidential candidate.

06/25/12 Update: And now we see that Michigan’s just flipped from toss-up to Leans Obama, giving him a total of 269 EVs of the 270 needed. And with the GOP-dominated SCOTUS just handing down an SB1070 ruling that preserves the worst and key part of it, Romney can kiss goodbye any hope of getting the Latino vote.